Chapter 23
Urgent voices cut in and out of the soothing darkness in which I’m floating. Pieces drift toward me, but I can’t seem to grasp them before they move past me.
“… told you it was a bad idea.”
“Just help me with…”
“… the door, I can’t get the…”
“They’re coming this way. Either you do something or…”
Eventually the voices fade out altogether, leaving me alone, and I lose track of everything, sinking back into the darkness.
Some unknown amount of time later, I open my sticky, gritty eyes.
I’m staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling. No ancient acoustical tiles with cutouts for the wood beams. So not my room in Branwick. But it’s too quiet to be the hospital, the surface beneath me too soft. A glimpse of overstuffed blue cushion triggers a vague memory, but I can’t place it.
I try to sit up, realizing a cool, damp washcloth is resting on my forehead only when it slips down over my eyes.
“Wait,” Carter says from somewhere behind me.
“Just slow down.” A moment later, the washcloth vanishes and Carter is next to me, frowning down at me.
“How is your head?” His gaze searches my face as he sits on the wooden coffee table opposite me.
I’m on a massively oversized couch. “Any double vision?”
“No. I don’t know,” I answer. My body feels like one big jangled painful nerve stuffed in one of those battered and grimacing self-defense dummies on wheels that we used freshman year. I hurt. Everywhere.
But now, at least, I know where I am. Carter’s apartment. On the big cozy blue sofa. My shoes are off, and his coat is missing.
With a hand under my arm, Carter helps me sit up. A nauseating wave of dizziness rolls over me, and I clutch at his hand for support, too weak to care what it might signal.
“Here.” Carter holds a metal tumbler with a straw poking out the top to my mouth. “Water.”
I take it, giving myself a moment to get my bearings.
My gaze falls on the neatly organized entertainment center to my left, beneath the large flatscreen on the wall.
The shelves hold a variety of books and a few DVDs.
Including my … our favorite sports movies.
That makes my heart hurt, and I have to look away.
I turn my attention to the water and draw in a sip, coughing when it hits the back of my dry throat. “What happened?” I ask when I can breathe again. I take the tumbler from him to hold it myself. My hand shakes a little, and the metal straw jangles with the movement.
Carter eyes it for a long second, and I’m pretty sure he’s weighing whether to take it back and hold it for me. So I tighten my grip to steady it.
“Whatever you and Devon were trying didn’t work. You tried to tell him no, but he insisted.” Carter looks as though he’s about to grind his back teeth to bits. “Next thing I knew, you were screaming and…”
He glances away, his jaw working. “You flew backward until you hit the trunk of one of the pine trees.”
Ah. That explains the pain radiating from my back.
So Devon tried to help me claim Beecher, and rather than the additional strength working in our favor, the denial came through that much harder. If Beecher was an iPhone then we’d have just been locked out for the next nine hundred years.
“The police officers heard you screaming, so we had to get out of there,” Carter says. “He did … whatever he does to them, so they wouldn’t stop us, and I got my car to bring you back here.”
I hand Carter back the tumbler. “Where is Devon now?”
“He went to the union to check out the historical display you mentioned.” Carter sets the water down on the coffee table with a firm thunk, one that sounds more like a gavel strike. Judgment rendered. He is pissed at Devon, that’s for sure. So I wonder if Devon went or if Carter sent him.
“All right.” I scoot forward to the edge of the couch gingerly. “Where are my shoes?”
His blue eyes widen in disbelief, then narrow in anger.
“Are you kidding me? Jocasta, that?” He points in the general direction of the cemetery.
“That could have killed you. A few inches to the left or right and it might have snapped your neck.” He shakes his head, exhaling sharply.
“I don’t care who or what you are, that’s fatal. ”
So not just pissed at Devon, but me too. If he were capable of it, he would be sending out streams of smoke from his nose right now.
“Carter,” I begin. “I know this is an overwhelming situation and a lot of information to absorb. You’ve dealt with it really, really well.” Absurdly well, even. “But I don’t have a choice—”
“You do,” he says fiercely, leaning toward me. “You can just leave. Run. Make a new life somewhere else.”
“They’ll find me eventually,” I say, lifting my hands helplessly. “And I can’t leave everyone I care about here—”
“So you’ll force them to see you suffer instead?” he demands.
I wince. “Look, I get that none of this makes sense to you. It barely makes sense to me, honestly. But I have to—”
He stands abruptly. “I can’t do it. I can’t watch you go through this. I never signed up for this.” He turns away from me and the couch, staring out at the sliding glass door across the room.
My heart sinks, a cavernous opening taking hold in my chest.
“I never asked you to,” I say stiffly. I can’t stop myself. No matter how pathetic it sounds.
Carter turns to face me, heightened color in his cheeks. “No, you never would. Because you never wanted to admit to having feelings that might require commitment—”
Fury whooshes to life inside me, and I push to my feet, ignoring the swirl of dizziness. “You must be joking right now.” I jab a finger at him. “I’m not the one who ignored you for the better part of a semester unless there was a convenient closet or laundry room available.”
He grimaces. “That was a mistake. I’ve apologized for that. I didn’t know, and it seemed too good to be true.” His gaze flips to my face. “You seemed too good to be true.” He hesitates, then adds. “I was—and still am—afraid of screwing up your life.”
That might have softened me, once. Not anymore. “So you say,” I snap. “You never asked me out, never wanted to be seen in public. Pushed for us to be friends instead. To protect your career.”
He turns on me, and we are face to face, nose to, well, throat, the tension straining between us. “Do you do relationships, Jocasta?” He bites off the question. “Do you? Pretty sure you told me otherwise.”
Heat soars up through my neck and into my face at the memory of those early whispered conversations, punctuated by gasps and heated moans muffled by his hand over my mouth.
“I took what you seemed willing to offer,” he says. “While, yes, making sure we were both protected from the fallout.”
“Please,” I sneer. “Don’t do me any favors. I deserve somebody who wants me, all of me. Not just whatever is convenient.”
He rakes a hand through his hair. “You are the furthest thing from convenient, Jocasta. Believe me.”
“I don’t even know what I’m still doing here.” Hot tears flood my vision. I shove past him to get around the corner of his ridiculous couch. “Where are my shoes?”
“I am in love with you.”
I freeze, hand clutching the back of the sofa for support.
“And it is the best thing and worst thing that has ever happened to me.” He sounds as if he’s both sad and angry about it.
I might have been insulted, except I know exactly what he means. I turn around so I can see his face.
“Does the girl who gave you a hickey know that?” I ask, hating the wobble in my voice. The mark is gone from his jaw already, like it never existed, but I remember.
Carter advances on me. “I told you, it was a bruise. I have never lied to you.” He pauses, with a conflicted expression. “I’ve kept things from you. My feelings, among them.”
I’m not sure I have room to argue about him keeping secrets; I’ve certainly kept a big one from him.
“But I’m telling you the truth now. There’s no one but you,” he says, closing the distance between us until I can feel the heat radiating from his body.
I want to touch him, to run my hands across the smooth fabric of his shirt across his chest, drag my fingertips across the rough velvet of his worn jeans, where previous experience tells me he’ll be hard and waiting before I’ve even laid a hand on him.
But I refrain, just vulnerable enough in this moment to want him to move first.
Carter reaches out and cups my jaw, his thumb running over my bottom lip. My breath catches.
He leans in and brushes his mouth lightly across mine, then pulls back to check with me. His gaze is heated, but he waits until I nod.
Sinking his fingers into my hair, he pulls me tighter against him, and I clutch at his shirt, holding tight both for my own balance and against the idea of him pulling away again.
His tongue teases mine, tasting. It’s slow and gentle, restrained even. Nothing like before.
I raise up on my tiptoes to kiss him back, to deepen it beyond this almost chaste exchange, but with his hands in my hair, he keeps that bare distance between us, only closing it at his leisure.
Frustration builds in me, and it takes me a second to figure out what’s going on. The gentleness, the soft touches.
“Stop being so careful,” I say against his mouth, my voice raspy. “You’re not going to hurt me.” Certainly not any worse than I’ve already been hurt, and those aches and pains are already fading. For possibly the first time in my life, I’m grateful for the nonhuman portion of my heritage.
To prove my point, I lean forward and bite his lower lip. Just for a second. Enough to remind him of those earlier encounters. The desperate noises he pulled from me, the heat of his breath on my inner thighs as my knees weakened, that hot wet stripe of his tongue against my center.
He exhales sharply against my cheek and his hands drop to my hips, squeezing tight and yanking me against him.
That is more like it.
He thrusts against me, his erection solid and unforgiving, so close to where I need it. A needy whimper escapes me.